Landscape use cases

You can use Landscape to perform many common system administration tasks easily and automatically. Here are a few example How-To**s:

Group machines together to perform a task across the group

You can use tags to manage a group of computers. To add a tag to a group of computers:

1. Click on the Computers tab.
2. Select the computers you want to tag.
3. Click Info.
4. In the Tags section enter the tag you want to use.
5. Click the Add button.

Upgrade all packages on a certain group of machines

Using tags, you can perform an upgrade across a group of machines. If, for instance, you want to upgrade all your desktop computers, you might want to use “desktop” as a tag.

Starting the upgrade:

1. Click on the Computers tab.
2. Click the desired tag from the left column. This will select only the computers associated with the tag selected.
3. Click Packages.
4. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click Request upgrades. This will create a queued Activity for upgrading the computers.

Note: While the upgrade tasks are now in the queue, they will not be executed until you approve them. To approve the tasks, click select All and click the Approve button at the bottom of the page.

Keep a set of machines automatically up to date

The best way is to use upgrade profiles, which rely on access groups. If an access group is already setup for the group of machines you want to keep updated automatically, simply click on its name. If not, you must create an access group for them:

1. Click on your account name, then Access groups.
2. Specify a title for your new access group and click Save.

You must then add computers to the access group:

1. Click on the Computers tab.
2. Select all of the machines you want to keep updated by:

• using a tag if one exists
• using search to find the machines
• selecting them individually

3. Click on the Info tab.
4. In the Access group section, select the access group you want to move the machines to.
5. Click Update access group.

Now that you have added machines to an access group, you will need to create an upgrade profile:

1. Click on your account name, then Profiles.
2. Click the Upgrade Profiles link, then Add upgrade profile.
3. Complete the “Create an upgrade profile” form, defining:

• name
• the upgrade settings you want to use
• an access group
• the schedule you want to use

4. Click Save

Keep Landscape from upgrading a certain package on one of my servers

1. Click on the Computers tab, then Packages.
2. Use the search box at the top of the screen to find the package you want.
3. Click the triangle on the left of the listing line of the package you want to hold, which expands the information for that package.
4. Now click on the icon to the left of the package name. A new icon with a lock will replace the old icon, indicating that this package is to be held during upgrades.
5. Click Apply Changes.

Set up a custom graph

Suppose you want to monitor the size of the PostgreSQL database on your database servers, you may use tags to group these machines together. Now you can setup a graph to provide information from all of these servers:

1. Click on your account name, then Graphs.
2. Click the Add graph link.
3. Complete the Create graph form. In our example we would do something like:

• Title: PostgreSQL database size
• Provide a “Y-axis title” and define the machines you want the graph created for.
• Run as user: postgres
• Code:

#!/bin/bash
psql -tAc "select pg_database_size('postgres')"

Click Save

To view the graph, click on Computers, then Monitoring. You can select the monitoring period from the drop-down box at the top of the window.

Ensure all computers with a given tag have a common list of packages installed

Manage them via a package profile.

Landscape-clients with configuration management tools

If want to manage landcape-client through a configuration management tool such as Puppet, Ansible, etc., you can avoid getting duplicate computers by writing the /etc/landscape/client.conf and /etc/default/landscape-client files, and then restarting the landscape-client service.

/etc/landscape/client.conf

[client]
log_level = info url = https://landscape.canonical.com/message-system
ping_url = http://landscape.canonical.com/ping
data_path = /var/lib/landscape/client
registration_key = changeme
computer_title = my_machine
account_name = myaccount
include_manager_plugins = ScriptExecution

/etc/default/landscape-client

RUN=1

The advantage over calling landscape-config is that this will request a registration only if the client is not already registered against landscape-server. Be aware, that some configuration options (namely computer_title, tags, access_group) are only sent to landscape-server on registration.